Bad Blood

The Year of Governing Dangerously

Many thought Eliot Spitzer was the guy who could clean up Albany—until he went to war with almost every politician, of either party, in New York State. Interviewing the governor, the author tries to make sense of Spitzer’s troubling, tantrum-filled year.

It was Inauguration Day—Day One, the day everything was supposed to change. The strains of “Fanfare for the Common Man” dissolved into the chilly Albany air, and Governor Eliot Spitzer, Princeton ’81, Harvard Law School ’84, rose to speak. “Like Rip van Winkle … New York has slept through much of the past decade while the rest of the world has passed us by,” he declared as his predecessor, George Pataki, squirmed nearby. But now “the light of a new day shines down on the Empire State.” (He’d ignored everyone else’s counsel to hold the ceremonies indoors, and the comparatively mild weather, at least for the tundra in January, was surely another sign the gods were with him.) He promised leadership as ethical and wise as all New York. He called on his fellow citizens to enter “the arena,” just as his idol, Theodore Roosevelt, had once urged, and as he himself had done. Then he went Churchillian. “Lend your sweat, your toil, and your passion to the effort of building One New York,” he implored. “My fellow New Yorkers, our moment is here. Day One is now.”

For all the soaring rhetoric, though, the phrase people would most remember from Eliot Spitzer’s inauguration last New Year’s Day came not from Eliot Spitzer at all. It came later that day, when James Taylor sang for the new governor and over a thousand guests at an arena—not the kind T.R. had in mind—nearby. That phrase, combined with Spitzer’s vulgar enhancement of it, would take its place in American political lore, alongside “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” and “Ask not what your country can do for you” and “I’m not a crook”—and would become his unofficial motto, though no one would know this for a few more weeks. “I’m a steamroller, baby,” Taylor sang. “I’m bound to roll all over you.”

In late January, Jim Tedisco, a Republican and the minority leader of the State Assembly, was driving to Albany on the Governor Thomas E. Dewey New York State Thruway—named for the last crime buster before Spitzer to catapult himself to the capital—when his cell phone rang. It was the governor, asking him to attend a press conference announcing ethics-reform legislation. Tedisco resisted; he’d just been excluded from some key meetings, and feared he’d merely be a prop. (Spitzer recalls it was Tedisco, dissatisfied with his treatment by the governor, who initiated the discussion.) That was when he got what’s now known around Albany as the “Full Spitzer,” or at least the electronic version, minus the bulging veins and spluttering that eyewitnesses get to see.

Spitzer’s voice suddenly changed, Tedisco recalls: it became louder, shriller, more guttural, more menacing. In three weeks he’d done more for New York State than any governor in history, Spitzer screamed. He was having enough trouble with the other goddamned legislative leaders, he went on; Tedisco would do what he was told—or he’d be crushed. As if the point weren’t sufficiently clear, Spitzer put it another way, courtesy of James Taylor. “Listen,” he shrieked, “I’m a fucking steamroller, and I’ll roll over you and anybody else.”

“I was thinking to myself, My God, is this really the governor?” Tedisco recalls. “To tell you the truth, I almost drove off the thruway It’s almost like an addiction he has to be confrontational,” Tedisco goes on. “The only way to help him is to buy a Dale Carnegie course for better communication skills, or 10 counseling lessons on temper control.” And it was all such a pity, given the high expectations for the man. “He had everything going for him,” Tedisco says. “He’s the one guy who could have turned this whole thing around.”

Note the tenses—past and past conditional—because they’re the ones that politicians, Republicans and Democrats alike, often employ these days to describe the 48-year-old Spitzer. Brilliant and energetic, he was as much crowned as elected, swept into office in the biggest landslide in New York gubernatorial history. A Democrat from New York City, he brought New Yorkers together, Republican and Democratic, upstate and down. No one seemed better equipped than the former “Sheriff of Wall Street,” arguably the most influential state attorney general in American history, to get dysfunctional Albany, the captive of special interests, unstuck. Wherever Spitzer went, people wanted to follow, sometimes quite literally. At six o’clock on inauguration morning, he took a two-mile jog around Albany’s Washington Park, and 200 people got up early enough to accompany him.

But, by any definition, Spitzer has had a rocky maiden year. As his first anniversary approaches, the State Legislature has largely ground to a halt. New York’s most powerful Republican, Joseph L. Bruno, now barely speaks to him after Spitzer’s office sicced the state police (and considered siccing the I.R.S.) on him. Many members of Spitzer’s own party loathe him. Newspapers, even deadly rivals such as the New York Post and the New York Daily News, have turned against him. Even his great champion, The New York Times, has soured on him. The Daily News’s Michael Goodwin, one of his harshest critics, wrote recently that Spitzer “seems incapable of telling the truth, admitting mistakes or working with anybody of either party,” and urged New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg to challenge him in 2010. (In October, a Siena College poll showed that Bloomberg, who strenuously insists he doesn’t even want the job, would beat Spitzer. In November, the same poll found that only one in four voters was prepared to re-elect Spitzer, while nearly half preferred “someone else.”)

Thanks largely to Spitzer and particularly to his short-lived and politically disastrous proposal to grant driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants, imperiled state Republicans feel resurrected. Spitzer’s radioactivity has even spilled over into the presidential race, with Hillary Clinton, through various contradictory statements on the subject, sprinkling isotopes from the license fiasco all over herself before Spitzer withdrew the plan in mid-November. Many of the usual suspects in all the glowing Spitzer profiles that have appeared over the years have suddenly gone mute. Ask Jim Cramer of CNBC’s Mad Money, Spitzer’s pal from Harvard Law School, about the guy and he is uncharacteristically speechless.

Elite as it was, there turn out to be a few holes in the education of Eliot Spitzer. It seems he has never learned how to work well with other people. He has never unlearned how to be a prosecutor. He did not know Albany. And, until he bailed out on the license proposal, he could never admit that he was wrong—if not on the merits in that instance, then at least on the execution. His enemies describe it all with Schadenfreude, and maybe a few I-told-you-sos. Admirers speak angrily, sadly, almost elegiacally about opportunities lost, maybe irretrievably so. “It’s all so frustrating, because he actually was right [about things],” says Ester Fuchs, a professor of public affairs and political science at Columbia University and lifelong student of New York politics. “He just didn’t know how to do it.”

Visit with Spitzer, though, and you sense none of this. It is as if it were still Inauguration Day, and he’d just gotten off the podium. You sense the incredible discipline and self-control and intelligence that got him so high so fast, and which, if the gods reappear, will get him out of his predicament. He is immaculate, formal, upbeat. Whatever he is feeling, whatever bruises he bears, sit in a closet somewhere: The Picture of Eliot Spitzer. He even says so: “I’m not great at the self-reflecting type of answers. It’s not my nature.”

As soon as he reached Albany, Spitzer set out to destroy Bruno, first by trying to pick off from Republicans the few seats the Democrats need to take control of the State Senate. That’s just politics. So, too, was it just politics when Spitzer’s aides tried to prove that Bruno, who has led the Senate for the last dozen years, was a thief, flying off regularly to partisan political events on the taxpayers’ tab. What was not just politics, though, was when the governor’s office used the state police to help make his case. In July, Spitzer’s old nemesis, New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo, found that, while the governor’s people had broken no laws, the whole thing reeked. Spitzer quickly and abjectly apologized, something he has rarely had to do. But Troopergate, as the imbroglio has been called, still hangs over him like a dark cloud. As Jacob Gershman noted recently in The New York Sun, Wikipedia’s entry for Spitzer now devotes more lines to the scandal than to his glory years as attorney general.

At least as harmful to Spitzer has been his insistence that he had nothing to do with bringing in the state police, and that overzealous underlings were to blame. Making things worse has been his failure to testify under oath about it, or to hand over e-mails and other documents from his office. Seven of 10 New Yorkers—about the same percentage that voted for Spitzer—are calling for sworn public testimony. The state ethics commission is investigating the matter; Spitzer insists he’s prepared to testify before it. (A State Senate committee is investigating, too, but Spitzer can argue, and justifiably, that it’s a partisan witch hunt, and legal wrangling will likely cripple it.)

Bad Blood from the Get-Go

Even before reaching Albany, Spitzer infuriated legislators of both parties. You don’t endear yourself to people by calling their world a “cesspool,” then promising to clean it up. If anything, Democrats, aching for a chief executive of their own after 12 frustrating years under the bland and unremarkable Pataki, are more put out with Spitzer than the Republicans are. One assemblyman told me that of his 107 Democratic peers 102 were disenchanted with Spitzer. Ask even friendly colleagues for the names of Spitzer’s champions and long, sheepish silences follow. Spitzer has disproved John Donne: in Albany these days, he is an island. Perhaps he should bring back James Taylor—this time to sing “You’ve Got a Friend.”

To give him his due, Spitzer has accomplished some significant things, particularly early on. He has revamped workers’ compensation to increase benefits for injured workers and reduce employee costs. He has increased and re-structured education spending so that tax dollars now go more consistently where they’re most needed. He has lopped some $1 billion off the state’s out-of-control Medicaid tab. His budget was passed almost on time—a rarity. He has secured passage of a law for the civil confinement of sexual offenders, expanded health-care coverage for uninsured children, increased legal-aid funding for indigents, and created a $600 million fund for stem-cell research.

Perhaps the negative perceptions, as one of Spitzer’s advisers lamented to me, are a result of New York’s tabloid mentality. Or maybe they’re due to what he called “Eliot’s famous A.D.D.—that hyperkinetic Eliot Spitzer get-up-at-five-a.m.-and-run” mentality, which makes him more interested in moving forward than in touting what he’s already done. In any case, Spitzer’s good deeds have been lost in the past few months as Troopergate, along with the license proposal, has slowed down Albany’s glacial governance even further. Talk of Spitzer as eventual president, once a popular parlor game in New York Democratic circles, has largely evaporated.

A few times in his charmed life—when he got nosed out for the top job on the Horace Mann school newspaper; when he got turned down for college at Harvard; when he lost his first race for attorney general, in 1994; when he fibbed about all the money his real-estate-mogul father had used to bankroll his first two campaigns—Spitzer has faltered, but never like this. The question now is no longer how many miracles he can perform but whether he can get anything done at all. Spitzer is at one of those proverbial tipping points, poised somewhere between formidable and vulnerable, redeemable and incorrigible. His stumbles could furnish him the only ingredients he lacks—humility and empathy and wisdom, for starters—or prove they’re forever beyond his reach. A great drama will now play out in Albany, one that will determine whether Spitzer is still a comer or what, in another generation, would be called a busted phenom.

Spitzer has met his predicament with a mix of defiance and contrition. Some days he’s still “Zealiot,” declaring that he’s never backing down, that he’s governing on principles rather than poll numbers, that the voters are getting precisely what he promised—and what they still want. “You don’t change the world by whispering,” he likes to say. Other times, he listens conspicuously. He has belatedly created a kitchen cabinet of wonks, moguls, and sages, including Robert Rubin of Clinton-administration fame. He’s been making nice with legislative leaders and party powers. There have been interludes of self-awareness, such as a much-commented-upon speech at the Chautauqua Institution in August, built around theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s warnings about the perils of hubris. (The speech is predictably hung around his neck whenever he regresses, like the time shortly afterward when he told a Binghamton television reporter pressing him on Troopergate to “get a life, buddy.”)

When we meet, Spitzer takes a third tack: serenity, or at least whatever serenity an intense New Yorker can muster. Spitzer is not a natural politician; he is a bit awkward, maybe even shy, and speaks too quickly—the legacy, perhaps, of all those high-powered childhood dinner conversations, in which one had to make one’s points quickly or be left ignominiously behind. The realization is refreshing, even endearing: it means he actually had to work at something. At times, Spitzer seems almost gentle. When he explains his famed temper—with passion inevitably comes emotion, sometimes to excess, he says—it’s hard to imagine it’s ever even a problem. Of course, it’s all spin, but maybe that put-on gentleness is a distant cousin of the more genuine gentleness which, friends insist, resides five layers down, alongside the self-deprecating sense of humor, both aspects of the man that few ever get to see.

Our session is in his New York office, a government-issue room in a utilitarian high-rise on Third Avenue, with none of those Fountainhead views of mighty Manhattan. The flat water he serves is a politically incorrect import from Maine (Poland Spring) rather than homegrown stuff from Saratoga Springs; then again, Saratoga is in Bruno’s district. Spitzer rises to none of my bait; there aren’t even any Quarter Spitzers this day. He is as tightly controlled as his shirt collar, which sits, behind a tie of robin’s-egg blue, snugly against his neck. (Spitzer is one of those people who look no more informal without a suit jacket than with one.) I ask him what he thinks of Fredric U. Dicker, the Post reporter who has attacked him relentlessly, and his answer could just as easily be applied to various other antagonists and detractors, such as Andrew Cuomo, CNN’s Lou Dobbs (who lambasted him almost nightly for his licensing scheme), and Rudy Giuliani. “Let me put it this way,” Spitzer says with a smile. “I don’t want you to think that I don’t have an answer to the question, but I also think you’ll understand that I’m probably clever enough not to give it to you. Plus, I’d diminish the value of my memoirs.” (Characteristically, he’s not keeping a journal.) His first year, he insists, went pretty much as expected; one could have foreseen that the tectonic changes he seeks “would evoke enormous pushback.” He knew things would be difficult. And they are.

Though he doesn’t say so himself, Spitzer clearly feels that the Times has forsaken him, leaving him to be eviscerated by the Post’s Dicker. Day after day, in dribs and drabs of 347 or 565 or 478 words on the Post’s second page, the paper’s longtime Albany-bureau chief has gone after him, most notably with the first Troopergate story, on July 5. What drives him? Spitzer aides offer many theories: Spitzer hadn’t paid him proper homage; he’s doing a Republican newspaper’s bidding; he’s miffed that Spitzer’s office leaked word about Joe Bruno’s state-funded helicopter rides to the Albany Times Union rather than to him. More likely, it’s simply that the Spitzer saga is just so damned juicy. Few stories beat those of Mr. Clean doing dirty tricks or Mr. Competent screwing up. Or of a role reversal: Utica and Syracuse and Binghamton taking down Manhattan (the Upper East Side overlooking the park, at that), Skidmore College knocking off Harvard Law School.

The Soul of an Old Machine

Skidmore is where Bruno, a handsome and precisely coiffed man of 78, more elegant than you’d expect a state senator to be, went to school, after a hardscrabble boyhood by the boxcars in Glens Falls, between Saratoga Springs and Lake George. Even without the chopper rides and police escorts, an existential clash between him and Spitzer was inevitable and, indeed, already under way. Unlike his predecessors, who tolerated the informal power sharing between the parties—each side controls one house in the Legislature—Spitzer is determined to take the State Senate from the Republicans, for the first time in four decades. He is but two seats away. Beneath the bravado and rough, roguish charm, Bruno was, at least until the past few months, a desperate man. Already under fire as the F.B.I. examines his business dealings, he is like Boss Jim Gettys, the cynical old pol in Citizen Kane whom Charles Foster Kane tries to take down, but who manages to take down Kane first—candidate kane caught in love nest. “I’m fighting for my life,” Gettys explains to the betrayed Mrs. Kane. “Not just my political life. My life.”

By attempting to rescue the Senate Democrats from political irrelevancy, Spitzer has turned them into the closest approximation of allies, although their loyalty, like every other Democrat’s in Albany, has been tested over the past year. “He’s not playing the go-along-get-along protection game that’s been going on for decades,” says Eric Schneiderman, a state senator from New York City. “And he’s moved a smart, progressive agenda that hopefully will serve as a model for the country. A lot of Democrats have been disappointed or angry or just plain puzzled at some of the things Eliot has done, but we still believe he very much wants to do the right thing.”

At first, says Bruno, he actually liked Spitzer. He liked his style: direct and straightforward. He liked the Christmas card he got from him every year—showing Eliot and Silda Spitzer and their three lovely teenage daughters—and the bottle of jam, made at their country home in Columbia County, an hour south of Albany. He liked Spitzer’s pro-business, middle-of-the-road politics. (Spitzer is no woolly liberal; he supports the death penalty, for instance.) According to Bruno, Spitzer told him that his problems as governor would be with Sheldon Silver, the Democratic Speaker of the Assembly, and not with him. (Spitzer disputes this, clarifying he anticipated he would have problems with the system and not with a particular person.) Most important, Bruno says, he thought they had a deal: he’d let Spitzer be the best chief executive New York ever had, and Spitzer would let Bruno keep his Senate majority. Together, they’d run New York.

Then, in what Bruno calls a “sneak attack,” Spitzer began campaigning for Democratic senatorial candidates in the most vulnerable Republican districts prior to the 2006 election. (There never were any such deals, Spitzer counters, nor could there have been, given his obligations as leader of the state Democratic Party and his commitment to clean Albany up.) When Bruno called to complain, he says, Spitzer grew angry and abusive. “I was absolutely astounded,” says Bruno. “He lost it.” A honeymoon followed the inauguration, but ended in about the time it takes to drive from Albany to Niagara Falls. With various blandishments, including job offers—“bribes,” Bruno calls them—Spitzer tried to entice Republican senators from Democratic-leaning districts into relinquishing their seats. Spitzer pushed for campaign-finance reform, which Bruno says gives an unfair advantage to rich, self-funding candidates like Spitzer himself. He also moved to cut Medicaid costs; the health-care workers’ union happens to be one of Bruno’s biggest backers.

A rhetorical war between them broke out. Bruno called Spitzer “an overgrown, rich spoiled brat.” Spitzer reportedly called Bruno “an old, senile piece of shit.” And the Full Spitzers followed. In one, says Bruno, Spitzer “did everything but hit his head against the wall and roll around the floor.” In another, “I thought he was going to have a damned stroke.” Over the phone once, Bruno says, Spitzer shouted at him, “I will knock you down, and when I knock you down, I will knock you out, and you will never get up. You will never recover.” “I told him to go fuck himself, in plain English,” Bruno recalls. He also urged Spitzer to enroll in “chief executives’ school.” “You’ve got to go and learn how to be a governor,” he says he told him. Several times while discussing Spitzer, Bruno twirled either his index finger or a bottle of Saratoga water by his head—as if to suggest Spitzer is nuts.

Threatening to knock out a former army boxing champion, even one 30 years his senior, is odd. So, too, for that matter, is threatening to roll over Tedisco, who once played basketball against Pat Riley and still holds a number of scoring records at his college. Spitzer is just the opposite of a bully: the bigger or tougher someone is, the more tempted he is to go after him. Many say it all goes back to Spitzer’s father; things might have been very different, they theorize, if only old Bernard Spitzer had let young Eliot beat him once or twice at Monopoly.

Lou Dobbs and Chuck Schumer, U.S. senator from New York, and Joe Bruno may all have called him a spoiled brat, but things have not been that easy for Spitzer. One’s angst is no less real for being rarefied.

As all those glowing profiles detail, he grew up in an intellectual cauldron. His father, a self-made real-estate tycoon—estimated worth: $500 million—who built luxury high-rises throughout Manhattan, was demanding; meals chez Spitzer, where Eliot and his two older siblings (Daniel, now a brain surgeon, and Emily, a lawyer) were assigned topics to discuss, sound as brutalizing as they were nourishing. They left Eliot intellectually agile, hypercompetitive, always with something to prove. A classmate recalls that when, at 12, Spitzer enrolled in the prestigious Horace Mann School, in the Bronx, his Samsonite briefcase standing out among the backpacks, he set out to ascertain how many of the boys there were smarter than he. (By his count, there were four.)

Then it was on to Princeton, where Spitzer was president of the student body. He spent one summer digging ditches and cleaning sewage in the South, then picking tomatoes in upstate New York, just to see how the other half lived. At Harvard Law School he made the Law Review but starred mostly as a research assistant for celebrity lawyer and professor Alan Dershowitz, who was then appealing the conviction of Claus von Bülow. (Felicity Huffman played Spitzer in the film Reversal of Fortune. Hey, it’s Hollywood.) He also met his wife, a North Carolinian named Silda Wall. She is at least as intelligent as and considerably more diplomatic than he. (I ask a classmate, who still marvels that he landed her, what she did for him. “She made him smile,” he replies.)

He spent one year clerking for a federal judge in New York, then another at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, one of New York’s most prestigious and politically connected corporate firms. For six years after that, he tried cases in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. Then he returned to private practice at an even more high-powered firm, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. A partnership there, or maybe a sinecure in his father’s business, beckoned. But to everyone’s surprise—his wife’s included—he decided to run in the Democratic primary for state attorney general. It was 1994, and he was 35 years old.

Using as collateral several apartments his father had given him, he took out loans totaling some $4 million to finance his campaign. Advising him was an old family friend, Dick Morris, then Bill Clinton’s campaign guru, too; Morris recommended lots of commercials, which is where the money went. Caught with a toe-sucking call girl in a Washington hotel room, Morris soon fell from grace, and from Spitzer’s public orbit; that he subsequently consulted for right-wingers like Jesse Helms, then became one of Connecticut’s most egregious tax scofflaws, assured that Spitzer would keep his distance from him. Some nonetheless speculate that the two remain in touch; Roger Stone, the notorious Republican consultant whom Bruno brought in last May to neutralize Spitzer, says Morris commended Niebuhr’s anti-hubris essay to Spitzer a decade or more ago. (“Isn’t this the greatest defense for hubris you’ve ever seen?” Morris exclaimed, according to Stone. “Nixon should have used that!”) Spitzer denies that Morris gave him the essay. “I haven’t spoken to Dick in … two years, maybe?” he says. “A long time.” Morris, who reportedly collected around $100,000 for each of Spitzer’s first two campaigns, isn’t talking.

Spitzer finished fourth in a field of four, having paid $33 a vote, but he impressed many. “His jaw actually juts,” the Times marveled. Everyone saw the campaign as a well-oiled dry run, and for the next four years—from the convenient perch of a law partnership with his former boss and mentor, a Manhattan lawyer named Lloyd Constantine—he drove around the state, making contacts, spreading largesse. He won the Democratic primary in 1998. But after confessing that, contrary to his public statements and even sworn testimony, his old man really had funded both his races, he just barely won.

An Attorney General at War

Despite his thin margin of victory, Spitzer compiled a dazzling record. He went after great financial institutions—huge firms, mutual funds, insurance companies, the New York Stock Exchange itself. His M.O. became familiar: find fraudulent or deceitful practices; confront wrongdoers; publicize (or leak) the cases against them and thereby wreak havoc with their stock prices; work out massive settlements that would frighten other wrongdoers into ponying up as well. Full Spitzers, filled with profanity, abuse, fury, and grandiosity—“I’m so fucking rich, they can’t take me down,” he told the target of one tirade, throwing in for good measure that he’d done more for poor people than anyone in the history of the state—were often in the mix. Always, the object wasn’t perp walks or jail time—in this respect, he parted ways with his political doppelgänger Giuliani—but to reform entire industries. There were massive environmental cases, too; in one, out-of-state power companies pouring pollutants into New York were brought to heel.

Someone who once worked closely with Spitzer told me that to understand him properly you have to realize that on some subconscious level he feels he is “slumming.” People of his pedigree normally don’t seek elective office, much less state elective office. They flock to the private sector, where they amass money and power and prestige. Government service is unremunerative and grubby; if they go for it, it’s only when people come to them, to be federal judges or Brahmin diplomats à la Cyrus Vance. But Spitzer entered the arena, just as Theodore Roosevelt commanded. (T.R.’s picture still hangs in his office.) With evangelical fervor, he persuaded other superstars (at least on paper: he has always been dazzled by credentials) to slum with him. As his marriage proved, he likes having smart people around, though often it turns into an intense competition. “You couldn’t have a discussion without him screaming,” one old associate recalls. “He’d talk really fast, agitated, spewing things at you, personal things. Even when you disagree on substance, it always becomes personal. Somehow he was belittling everything I was, not just what I believed.” In this instance Congressman Charles Rangel’s famous—and, in context, unflattering—description of Spitzer as “the world’s smartest man” rang completely true: being a state politician “makes him want to show everyone instantaneously, notwithstanding those two chips on his shoulder, that he’s a brilliant, brilliant guy.”

The competitiveness colored his views of other politicians. He regarded the newly elected Bloomberg, for instance, as a fluke, winning only because of 9/11. Sure, Spitzer noted, a freshly minted senator from Illinois named Barack Obama had once been president of the Harvard Law Review, but that didn’t prove he was brilliant, only that he was popular. And then there was Rudy. Spitzer grew miffed when the then mayor never took his calls. Only in 2002 did Giuliani initiate a conversation, urging Spitzer to go easy on Merrill Lynch, one of Spitzer’s most celebrated prosecutorial targets and a new Giuliani client; even then, Giuliani was playing the 9/11 card, and Spitzer found it disgusting. The distaste was mutual: according to The Weekly Standard, Giuliani once said that after spending time with Spitzer he wanted to take a shower. (“I’d be curious to know when he said that, because the number of times I’ve actually met [Giuliani] could be counted on two or three fingers,” Spitzer says.)

Attorney General Spitzer did not take on fellow politicians, brilliant or otherwise, or the real-estate industry, perhaps also for obvious reasons. He showed little interest in the more prosaic work of the office. The high-profile, high-visibility cases invigorated him most, and he courted, and catered to, and followed assiduously, the press. Mornings, his first task was to read the clips. Nothing pleased him more than landing on A1 of The New York Times, preferably above the fold. “He wants to do a good job,” says Hank Sheinkopf, a New York political consultant who worked on Spitzer’s first two campaigns. “But ultimately what he really gives a shit about is whether Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and The New York Times love him, because, in the back of his brain, if they don’t love him, he’s nobody.”

There was plenty of adoration on the newsstands. “Make no mistake: Spitzer is the Democratic Party’s future,” Sridhar Pappu wrote in The Atlantic. Only the conservative business press, which saw him as an anti-capitalist menace and martinet, dissented. The “Lord High New York Executioner,” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page called him. With the New York Republican Party in shambles, Spitzer was the governor-in-waiting, particularly once his arch-rival, Senator Schumer, opted not to run. But was Albany a mere way station? Already, Spitzer’s father, a Jewish Joe Kennedy if ever there was one, was fantasizing about nights in the Lincoln Bedroom. Once, he was asked if his son would like to be president. “It’s his very nature,” he replied.

Spitzer began his governorship aggressively, signing five executive orders—among them, one to prevent state employees from using government property for themselves. But some felt he squandered the long lead time to his inevitable victory, making his promises of sweeping change from Day One unrealistic, if not reckless. So, too, did a number of mediocre appointments, largely of cronies from his old job. “Almost Rudy-esque” was how one political person described it, referring to Giuliani’s well-known penchant for taking a posse of the same old sycophants with him wherever he goes. “Clearly things had gone to his head, and he felt no need to really actively recruit fresh thinking and new talent,” says someone who watched it all. Then again, getting superstars to move to Albany—“Albania,” as New Yorkers consigned there like to call the capital, three hours to the north of Manhattan—isn’t easy.

Legislators already put off by someone who campaigned against the “cesspool” in which they all worked were further irked when he bypassed them for critical appointments, as well as by his condescending vibes. “He felt he could walk on water,” one prominent assemblyman gripes. Things got worse when Spitzer unsuccessfully tried to get the State Assembly to fill the vacant post of comptroller with his own choice, then denounced those who’d bucked him in picking one of their own. “Friendships play a role in politics. Hillary Clinton is my friend. Chuck Schumer is my friend. Eliot Spitzer is not my friend,” says Democratic assemblyman Daniel O’Donnell. “I don’t know who Eliot’s friends are. He’s not making friends. He seems to think that because it’s right it should happen. That’s true. But that’s not how governing works.” Bruno even claims that many Democrats have thanked him privately for taking Spitzer on.

Blowing gaskets and hurling threats doesn’t work as well on fellow politicians as it does on corporate executives, a consultant for another major politician observes. “If you’re a C.E.O. at a company and I call and I say, ‘I’m going to fuck you, I’m going to destroy you, I’m going to indict your company,’ and I sound totally crazy, you hang up the phone, you go see your chairman of the board, and you say, ‘This guy is crazy, we need to settle,’ because you’re given no option,” he explains. “If you’re a state legislator and you get the same thing, you hang up the phone, you call the Albany Times Union, and you say, ‘This guy is crazy,’ because you don’t give a shit.”

Of Choppers and Coppers

On January 31, Dicker broke the steamroller story. (“F—-ing steamroller” is how the Post rendered it. The Times called it “a [expletive] steamroller.”) It was, people around Spitzer concede, his most egregious rhetorical blunder. Say “Spitzer” to focus groups these days and it’s “steamroller,” not “Wall Street” or “money” or “fighting the big guys,” that comes to mind. And it couldn’t be just “steamroller,” but “fucking steamroller,” giving it a crude, salacious edge. Spitzer’s communications director, Darren Dopp, said at the time that the story had been “embellished.” But Constantine, now a senior adviser to Spitzer, who was with him when he said it, insists that the phrase had simply stuck in Spitzer’s mind from James Taylor’s performance, and that Spitzer was smiling when he said it. “He was John Wayne,” he says. “It was ironic, it was partially humorous.” That’s not how it came across to Tedisco or, frankly, to anyone else. “What sort of an idiot, even if he is a fucking steamroller, says he’s a fucking steamroller?” one Democratic assemblyman asks indignantly. Spitzer himself says he has “only the foggiest” recollection of the exchange.

In May, concerned for his perilous Senate majority and eager to make Spitzer an electoral liability to Democratic state-senatorial candidates in any way he could, Bruno brought on Roger Stone, whom The Weekly Standard recently described as a “political operative, Nixon-era dirty trickster, professional lord of mischief.” It was Stone who helped stage the controversial “Brooks Brothers Riot” of 2000, in which well-dressed protesters descended upon Miami and helped shut down the recount. (Like Dick Morris, with whom he once worked, Stone had his brush with scandal: ads featuring photographs of him and his wife seeking sexual partners once appeared in a swingers’ magazine.)

Stone’s monthly fee was $20,000—roughly the cost of three round-trip rides on the state helicopter from the helipad at the Albany exit off the thruway to West 30th Street in Manhattan, the route Bruno so often took. Under the rules, though, such trips were kosher as long as they included even the merest whiff of official state business. Bruno clearly knew this, and always covered himself. Still, when James Odato of the Times Union asked Darren Dopp for information about Bruno’s trips to New York for Republican fund-raisers, Dopp apparently saw a chance to embarrass the majority leader.

A Spitzer loyalist who’d come with him from the attorney general’s office, Dopp began collecting materials on Bruno’s trips, past, present, and future, not just airborne but also on the ground, when the state police, citing death threats Bruno said he had received, provided one of those flashing-lights escorts. Pitching in were William Howard, Spitzer’s liaison to the police, and Preston Felton, the acting police superintendent.

Top senior Spitzer aides depict the whole operation as amateurish—“a bungling Keystone Kops communications exercise,” one puts it—done by staffers overeager to please the boss. Dopp, they say, felt marginalized in the new administration. Howard was a holdover from Pataki, also intent on earning his spurs. And Felton wanted to remove the “acting” from his title. In fact, when Dopp proposed a press release detailing Bruno’s dubious travels, Spitzer’s chief of staff, Rich Baum, and chief counsel, David Nocenti, rejected the idea: they knew Bruno had met the travel regulations’ porous requirements. Spitzer apparently knew enough about the scheme to agree with them.

In late June, Dopp told Odato about the travel documents he’d collected, and Odato got them through a Freedom of Information Law (foil) filing. On July 1 he reported on the front page of the Albany Times Union that, three times in May, Bruno had used taxpayer-funded aircraft and ground transportation to attend political events in New York City. (Playing dumb for the story, Dopp pledged publicly to “review this matter carefully.”) Three measly flights to New York: to Dicker, who’d covered infinitely greater abuses by other politicians, the story sounded orchestrated. “Bruno Set-Up,” he slugged his own piece for the next day.

Despite its private conviction that Bruno had done nothing illegal, the Spitzer administration quickly asked Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to investigate. It was a risky move, given Spitzer and Cuomo’s troubled history. By all accounts, they do not like each other. Spitzer refused to endorse Cuomo in his bid for governor in 2002. When Cuomo ran to succeed him as attorney general four years later, Spitzer privately preferred Cuomo’s rival, Mark Green, in the Democratic primary, believing that he posed much less of a long-term threat than a Cuomo resurrected from his disastrous gubernatorial race. Moreover, Spitzer knew that despite their differing party affiliations Bruno and Cuomo are friendly; Bruno has often spoken, almost wistfully, about what a good governor Cuomo would make. (“They are still all Italians,” Stone observes. “Note how the I-ties all bind and the Jews fight: Schumer-hates-Spitzer-hates-Silver-hates-Bloomberg.”) One assemblyman likened Spitzer and Cuomo to two ax murderers vying to lop off the other one’s head first.

On July 5—no sense wasting a great story over the Fourth—Dicker broke word of the plot. Spitzer and his aides, he wrote, had “targeted” Bruno through an “unprecedented state police surveillance program.” In a television interview, Bruno denounced Spitzer as a “Third World dictator” and his aides as “hoodlums” and “thugs.” He, too, asked Cuomo to investigate. “What he’s trying to do to me he’s capable of doing to anyone,” Bruno tells me. “He saw Bruno as the only guy standing in his way, who he couldn’t roll over, who he couldn’t hoodwink, that he couldn’t just dismiss. So he had to get rid of me.”

Noting Spitzer’s sharp elbows and what the British like to call his control-freakery, even many Democrats say it’s inconceivable Spitzer did not know about what Dopp and the others were up to. Henry Stern, the former New York City parks commissioner, who has chronicled Troopergate in his political newsletter, called that very notion “cockamamie.” “Either he consented to the scheme or he concocted it,” he says. “That he was ignorant is beyond reason.” But Constantine says ignorant is exactly what Spitzer was. “If Eliot had known about it, he would have nixed it,” he says. “And to the very, very limited degree he learned about something, he nixed it.”

For the next two weeks, Spitzer maintained that his staff had simply responded to a foil request, and that the state police had followed its standard procedures. Only on July 19, he has said, did he learn otherwise. In the meantime, Cuomo’s investigators were doing their work, interviewing, among others, Felton and Howard. Spitzer has said his office “fully cooperated” with Cuomo. In fact, it refused to let his investigators interview Dopp and Baum, having them submit short, unilluminating affidavits instead. It was, some in Spitzer’s circle complain, the reflexive reaction from the hyper-cautious, politically tone-deaf lawyers with whom Spitzer had surrounded himself. When word leaked—apparently from Cuomo’s camp—that the Spitzer folks had not been as forthcoming as the governor had claimed, there arose the telltale scent of a cover-up.

An Old Rival Weighs In

On July 23—a Monday, political observers noted, giving the “Eliot Mess” story a whole newspaper week to reverberate—Cuomo released his report. Spitzer’s office had broken no laws, it concluded, but it had acted improperly, thrusting the state police precisely where it did not belong: “squarely in the middle of politics.” It recommended that the governor conduct a “policy and personnel review” within his office. As for Bruno, it gave him a pass. Strictly as a matter of Realpolitik, Cuomo pulled it all off masterfully: exonerating Spitzer of anything criminal, but implicating him in sleaze. “Andrew Cuomo has handled himself beautifully, superbly—exactly the way he should,” says former New York City mayor Ed Koch admiringly. What must Cuomo have thought, I ask him, when his old rival landed in such hot water? Koch looks skyward and holds his hands in prayer. “In his heart of hearts, he is saying to himself, ‘Thank you, God,’ ” Koch replies. (Cuomo not surprisingly declined comment.)

Spitzer immediately apologized for what he called his staff’s “clear lapses in judgment.” He suspended Dopp indefinitely without pay, throwing what was already an ineffectual P.R. team further off stride, and reassigned Howard to a job outside of the governor’s office. Without cultivating the relations most politicians enjoy, Spitzer had few defenders. Some sympathizers faulted him for caving: as Alan Chartock, a Spitzer supporter who hosts a popular public-radio program in Albany, puts it, going after Joe Bruno was exactly why people sent Spitzer there in the first place. People also wondered why Spitzer had even landed in such a mess; there were so many other, less byzantine ways to go after Bruno. Besides, what was the great rush? The most vulnerable Republican state senators are mostly old men. As is Joe Bruno. The solution was as much actuarial as political.

To sense Spitzer’s ordeal as the story unfolded, go to YouTube and watch his press conference of July 26, in which Dicker shouts at him, cuts him off, chastises him for his perceived evasiveness. Spitzer bites his tongue, smiles wanly, tries to keep his temper in check. Two questions Dicker never did ask Eliot Spitzer that day, Silda Spitzer already had, or so Spitzer told the Times: Why had he even gotten into this line of work? Would the family business really have been so bad? Spitzer conceded that the episode had undone much of what he had tried to do. His advisers tried to get him back on track, beginning with a picnic he was holding that weekend at his country house for 200 friends and donors. “Do me a favor,” one told him in advance. “There will be a lot of people there who you previously thought of as blowhards. Listen to them. Because somewhere in all their blowhardness, there’s probably a nugget of advice that might be helpful to you.”

Somehow, Spitzer had morphed from an ethical crusader into a dissembler, and Bruno from a chiseler to a victim. Bruno’s campaign was ingenious in its demonic brazenness, akin to the way in which a military malingerer like George W. Bush scored points off of John Kerry’s record in Vietnam. “Unbelievably well done by them,” one Spitzer adviser concedes. “They just have such balls.” A lot of the credit might have gone to Stone, but he was soon gone, after someone sounding suspiciously like him left a bizarre message on Bernard Spitzer’s office phone, warning him he’d soon be subpoenaed about his campaign loans to his son. “And there’s not a goddamn thing your phony, psycho, piece-of-shit son can do about it,” the message stated. “Bernie, your phony loans are about to catch up with you! You will be forced to tell the truth, and the fact that your son’s a pathological liar will … be … known … to all.” Investigators traced the call to Stone’s apartment at 40 Central Park South. “I was a little surprised at the crassness and, frankly, the stupidity of it all,” Spitzer says. Stone says the voice belongs to an impostor, part of a nefarious plot to get him off the Spitzer case. Sure enough, Bruno promptly canned him—at least officially. “Do you think he’s really gone?” one Spitzer insider asks me, telegraphing the suspicion that he’s not.

Dopp, Baum, and Spitzer all did talk, albeit not under oath, to investigators from the office of Albany district attorney P. David Soares. Soares’s September 21 report went easier on Spitzer, concluding that, even if his people had set out to smear Bruno, no one did anything illegal or, it seems, untoward: since the state police kept the records of Bruno’s travels, that would logically be the place to turn for them. Spitzer’s critics dismissed it as a whitewash from a Democratic prosecutor.

A Senate committee, really an arm of Bruno, Inc., is also investigating, and has asked to see Baum’s and Dopp’s e-mails. Spitzer’s office is fighting the request. It would be ironic indeed if e-mail, the basis of so many of Spitzer’s Wall Street stings, stung him. His advisers insist there’s nothing from Spitzer to Dopp directing him to implement “Operation Track Bruno,” or some such thing. Dopp is now ensconced with a high-powered Albany lobbyist and disinclined to dish to anyone about Spitzer, including to me, but that could change if he faces a perjury rap for possible testimony contradictions, let alone jail time.

In the end, says Constantine, Troopergate was piddling stuff. “It’s rogues, but it’s not rogues throwing Molotov cocktails,” he says. “These are spitballs.” What it really shows, he argues, is the extraordinarily high standard to which Spitzer has been held: for their own reasons, supporters and detractors alike demand perfection from him. “For you or me, we’d have to commit a felony,” he says. “For him, it’s just wiping his nose on his sleeve.”

In September, possibly to distract people from Troopergate, possibly to please his Hispanic constituency, Spitzer announced plans to grant driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants. It made sense, promising to increase highway safety, reduce insurance premiums, and help keep tabs on a hidden population. But it was introduced with characteristic ham-handedness, with virtually no consultation with political leaders. Spitzer stepped into a firestorm, with critics, Lou Dobbs being the most vocal, charging that the plan gave cover to terrorists. Spitzer made things worse by suggesting that his opponents were all rabid right-wingers. In fact, some prominent Democrats, and even some county clerks (the ones who would actually process the licenses), were among them. So was Bloomberg, who has generally been sympathetic to Spitzer (“teething problems,” he’s called his difficulties). When Bloomberg voiced reservations about the proposal, Spitzer promptly called him “wrong at every level—dead wrong, factually wrong, legally wrong, morally wrong, ethically wrong.” Such overheated rhetoric, and against an ally, has convinced some that Spitzer just can’t turn it off.

When, in late October, Spitzer backed off from some elements of the licensing scheme, he only created new problems for himself. Once more, he failed to consult beforehand, blindsiding colleagues who had stuck their necks out to support the plan. Even his beloved Times derided him as a “rookie” and accused him of caving in. The debacle heartened Republicans; they hoped that, with a man they saw as having questionable judgment, as well as ethics, running their state, New York voters would come to think divided government isn’t so bad after all. All those considerations undoubtedly led Spitzer on November 14 to chuck the proposal altogether. Predictably, the decision brought howls of betrayal from those favoring the measure and chortles from his critics. But in attempting to move on rather than digging in his heels, Spitzer showed a kind of flexibility, and insight, that even some sympathizers feared he simply didn’t have. Maybe, they hoped, he could start afresh: Day 318 could be the new Day One.

State Assembly leader Sheldon Silver, with whom Spitzer has had a complicated and awkward relationship, sounds guardedly optimistic about the governor’s prospects. “I really do think he’s learning, and most importantly his staff is learning,” he says. He can afford to be magnanimous: with all of Spitzer’s difficulties, the Speaker not only has tightened his own hold on the job (there were rumors early on that Spitzer fancied replacing him with someone more pliable) but may well have regained his position as New York’s most powerful Democrat.

Even if Spitzer continues to stumble, he can’t be beaten without a good opponent. Bloomberg insists he’s not interested, and Cuomo will certainly hang back unless something catastrophic happens. Meanwhile, acts of God or the F.B.I. or the electorate could intervene—Joe Bruno could get indicted. The Democrats could win back the State Senate (something that may be less likely with Giuliani atop the Republican ticket). Hillary Clinton could be elected president, buoying Democrats everywhere. Or something disastrous could happen, affording Spitzer a chance to shine. Look at what 9/11 did for Rudy. Perhaps it won’t be necessary. Spitzer has recently brought in new, more experienced aides. He’s turning more to seasoned advisers such as Constantine and, as the license debacle reveals, shows signs of listening. With three more years to go, he has the calendar on his side, and he still has the skills that got him to Albany: “He is a crafty-ass politician,” one adviser notes. “The ability to get out of a jam is something that people forget about the guy.” To Lieutenant Governor David Paterson, Spitzer is like George Foreman in the eighth round of his legendary 1974 fight against Muhammad Ali: on the canvas, for the first time in a career of professional perfection, in stunned disbelief. But unlike Foreman, he predicts, Spitzer will adjust, right himself, and adjust some more. Even the most intelligent people can smarten up.

And, hard sometimes as Spitzer can make it to pull for him, maybe that’s what we all should hope. For far more is at stake here than just some rich kid trying to please his pop. Talented and energetic, passionate and independent, scintillating and original, Spitzer may well be Albany’s best hope for a long, long time to come. Fifty years or more might pass before the planets align so spectacularly for someone again. And along with everything else he is, Spitzer remains a role model and trailblazer for all those other bests and brightests who need to be coaxed into public service, and into slumming it up in Albania.

Besides, on at least one front recently, Eliot Spitzer can claim victory. For the time being, Joe Bruno is taking private planes to New York. Or driving. Or even, occasionally, riding Amtrak.